Radiohead's Meeting People Is Easy is still playing American cinemas

Grant Gee's Radiohead tour film Meeting People Is Easy is still finding American screens nearly four months after its US premiere. Real Art Ways in Hartford gives it its first Connecticut showings this Friday and Saturday, and the Angelika Film Center in Houston has booked it for two midnights in early August.

In the scene every review picks out, Thom Yorke sits in the back of a New York cab wondering aloud whether anyone hears his songs the way he hears his favourite Smiths and R.E.M. records.

The idea that you would be one of those bands to somebody. That thing of it being imprinted on your heart, you know? Every note of it.

Thom Yorke¹

At the club, the doorman refuses to let him in and shouts “Creep” after him as he walks away. Rob Sheffield, reviewing the film for Rolling Stone, calls it the highlight of a jittery, nearly colourless blur of road fatigue that he finds impossible to stop watching. Matt Ashare of the Boston Phoenix finds it the most touching thing in the film that nobody staged. The line Rolling Stone and the Houston Press both quote is Yorke's, that driving round America listening to alternative radio is like hearing a fridge buzzing.

The American run began at South by Southwest in Austin on 20 March, with Gee there to answer questions, five months after the film's London premiere). Capitol took it on to Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Chicago. The screenings sold out in all four cities, and Los Angeles and New York held it over after fans were turned away.

The video and DVD were put back two weeks, to 18 May, so the cinema dates could finish and MTV could show it first, in a 50-minute cut on 120 Minutes. In Billboard's chart of 5 June it went in at number two on Top Music Video Sales, behind only the Backstreet Boys' Homecoming: Live in Orlando. A week later it was at number 18 on the overall video chart among the Hollywood films.

Gee, who made the “No Surprises” video, was first hired to film the OK Computer launch and stayed for the world tour. There are three new songs in the film, and it ends on one, played at Radio City Music Hall in New York in April last year. Gee's own favourite moment is a Philadelphia crowd singing “Creep” while Yorke's face goes from annoyed to elated.

The main thing that gets to you is the repetition. Trying to move forward but having to do the same things day after day.

Grant Gee¹⁰

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